Murdoch CEO Labels Bloggers “Political Extremists”

A stinging attack by John Hartigan, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, labels bloggers and alternative media outlets as “political extremists”. Hartigan implies that bloggers should be jailed as they are in oppressive police states like China and Burma.

“Bloggers don’t go to jail for their work. They simply aren’t held accountable like real reporters….It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights,” barked Hartigan.

“In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart.”

“Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common.”

Hartigan doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that the mainstream media is always found wanting because they habitually lie about news events and spin stories to suit the demands of their corporate owners. This is the very reason why blogs and alternative media outlets have become so popular and have eaten into the mainstream media’s audience share, because people are sick of being treated like idiots, sick of being lied to, and are desperately in search of the truth.

Indeed, Hartigan’s boss Rupert Murdoch confessed to the fact that his media empire tried to shape public opinion to support the war in Iraq In other words, Murdoch’s many prominent news outlets wantonly put out propaganda supporting the manufactured case for invasion. Murdoch admitted to this while lamenting the corporate media’s “loss of power” to alternative media and Internet blogs, seemingly unaware of the fact that the two are directly connected.

When the people know that the corporate media is deliberately lying to them about Niger yellowcake and weapons of mass destruction, they are going to seek alternative avenues of information. The fact that the corporate media habitually lies is a manifestly provable reality, not a “myth” as Hartigan ludicrously claims.

In addition, while mainstream media routinely uses anonymous sources and little more than bluster and hot air to back up their stories, blogs provide links to almost every claim they make so readers can research the source evidence for themselves. This is the opposite from Hartigan’s claim that blogs make “radical sweeping statements without evidence.” Indeed, this phrase perfectly characterizes tactics employed by the mass media on a daily basis.

As blogger Darryl Mason writes today, “John Hartigan is full of shit. Bloggers have gone to jail for their work, and to protect their sources, in North Korea, Iran, Egypt, the list of countries persecuting bloggers grows longer by the week. And the CEO of Australia’s biggest news corporation doesn’t know this?”

The jailing of bloggers for speaking too much truth is obviously not the kind of news that John Hartigan, a Rupert Murdoch CEO, is interested in. How could he not know about those jailing and prosecutions.

Remember those words. “Political extremism”.

You will hear that call more and more as the major news corporations scale up their war against independent media, and bloggers.

The source of the establishment’s move to claim that bloggers and alternative media outlets are “extremists” or at worst “terrorists,” as we first reported in September 2006, was a White House strategy document that the government had been following since 9/11.

In a September 5, 2006 speech President George W. Bush referred to the document as “an unclassified version of the strategy we’ve been pursuing since September the 11th, 2001,” that takes into account, “the changing nature of this enemy.”

The strategy paper on how to ‘win the war on terror’ cites “conspiracies” as one of the wellsprings of terrorism and threatens to “address” and “diminish” the problems they are causing the government in fulfilling their agenda.

According to World Net Daily, the DHS document was almost immediately rescinded, but the groups listed alongside Neo-Nazis, Aryan prison gangs and black power extremists again prove that the federal government is targeting American citizens who are merely knowledgeable about their rights and up on current issues as potential domestic terrorists to be treated as a “threat” to law enforcement.